Then, and Now, and Always: The Art of Nick Bustamante

Then and Now and Always brings Nicholas Bustamante’s long-standing inquiry into memory, inheritance, and identity to a powerful culmination. Though its title suggests a linear passage of time, the series rejects the idea that past, present, and future exist separately. Instead, Bustamante renders ancestral trauma and familial legacy as a nonlinear continuum—one in which beauty and terror, presence and absence, the inherited and the chosen all press against one another. Building on earlier bodies of work that explored haunting, loss, adoption, and the shifting meaning of home, this exhibition asks not only what lingers, but what we carry forward. The question is no longer simply what haunts us, but what we pass on—and whether those distinctions can ever truly be separated.

Through layered processes of scumbling, glazing, and selective excavation, Bustamante creates surfaces that feel less painted than unearthed, allowing earlier gestures to glow through like memory itself. Draped figures, empty garments, and liminal landscapes suspended between dusk and dawn embody a state of perpetual transition—neither fully grounded nor entirely untethered. Textiles function as visual genealogies, familiar yet unsettled, suggesting that legacy persists even when physical presence fades. These works offer no resolution. Instead, they hold viewers within the tension of coexistence, insisting that we are always negotiating what we inherit, what we choose, and what we release. In Then and Now and Always, nothing is fully buried, nothing entirely escapes; everything remains.